Haymarket (49 page)

The trap door dropped, cutting Albert off mid-sentence. The four bodies plunged downward, then swung in the air. For a moment they
seemed lifeless, then one by one they began to contort violently, the limbs contracting, the chests swelling with spasms, the arms convulsing. It was nearly eight minutes before the last of the four went entirely limp.

The bodies were left hanging for another ten minutes, then cut down and placed in plain coffins to be turned over to the relatives.

The doctors, during their final examination of the bodies, discovered that none of the necks of the men had been broken. All had died from slow strangulation.

At twelve-fifteen, the prison matron pushed open Lucy’s cell door and barked, “It’s over.” She slammed the door shut again, leaving Lucy and her children alone in the darkness. From the adjoining cell, Lizzie could hear their moans and sobs and, in a frantic effort at comfort, repeatedly called out their names. But there was no response, and the terrible moaning continued.

Three hours later, Captain Schaack abruptly appeared and told them they could go home. Though weak with exhaustion, Lucy planted herself firmly in front of Schaack and angrily protested the way they’d been treated. Schaack shrugged his shoulders, said he knew nothing of the matter, and told them they must leave at once.

The funeral cortege was the largest ever seen in Chicago. Two hundred thousand people lined the streets. Lucy wore heavy black crepe and rode in the first carriage with Lizzie and other friends. The five black hearses, Lingg having been reunited with his comrades, were entirely covered with flowers and wreaths. The cortege moved slowly down Milwaukee Avenue to the accompaniment of muffled drums. Onlookers threw red flowers from the streets, windows, and bridges. The faces of many in the crowd were streaked with tears, including several policemen guarding the line of march.

The city had prohibited the display of banners or flags, but an aging Civil War veteran stepped suddenly to the front of the hearses, unfurled a small American flag, and carried it, unchallenged, to the end of the march.

Thirty special trains carried some ten thousand people to the burial grounds at Waldheim Cemetery, ten miles west of the city. Many in the crowd wore red ribbons, the women on their bonnets, the men on their coats.

The sun was setting as Captain Black stepped forward at the cemetery to speak his brief eulogy. “We are not here,” he said softly, “beside the caskets of felons consigned to an inglorious tomb. We are here by the bodies of men who were sublime in their self-sacrifice.”

Other, angrier speakers, followed. “You, the workers of Chicago,” one of them shouted, “have permitted five of your best to be murdered in your midst … You’ve shown that you know how to bury your dead … You’ve loved faithfully and well. Now let us
hate
! … Vow it in the sight of these coffins … Shake off the yoke … Be free!”

CAPTAIN WILLIAM BLACK
lost most of his legal practice and income in the years immediately following the Haymarket trial. But with the passage of time he gradually regained a clientele. For the rest of his life, Black remained an outspoken admirer of the Haymarket defendants, and became politically active as a Populist Democrat. He died in 1916 at age seventy-four.

INSPECTOR JOHN BONFIELD AND CAPTAIN MICHAEL SCHAACK
were charged in 1889 with serving as fences for stolen goods and were suspended from the police force. Bonfield formed his own private detective agency, but it soon went bankrupt. Schaack retired to a farm in Wisconsin.

SAMUEL FIELDEN
, along with
NEEBE
and
SCHWAB
, was pardoned by Governor John Peter Altgeld in 1893—an act that cost Altgeld his political career. Fielden went back to the stone-cutting business for a time. Then, on receiving a small inheritance from a relative in England, he bought a ranch in Colorado, where he and his family raised cattle and chickens. He sporadically engaged in labor politics. He died in 1922 at age seventy-four.

JUDGE JOSEPH GARY
served on the bench, an honored member of the legal profession, for forty-three years, until the day before his death in 1906 at age eighty-five.

LIZZIE AND WILLIAM HOLMES
continued to write for anarchist and labor publications. In 1893, after the Altgeld pardons, they moved out west,
settling in New Mexico. Their home became a gathering place and refuge for political radicals. Lizzie died in 1926, William two years later.

OSCAR NEEBE
remarried shortly after his pardon, and he and wife ran a tavern together near the Chicago stockyards until his death at age sixty-five in 1916.

MICHAEL SCHWAB
never recovered from his years in prison. After being released in 1893, he barely scraped together a living running a small shoe store, out of which he also sold books. He died in 1898, age forty-five, from the tuberculosis he’d contracted in prison, leaving his wife and four children.

NINA VAN ZANDT
, after a prolonged period of mourning and isolation, twice remarried and divorced. Her parents lost most of their money and Nina was eventually reduced to poverty. She eked out a living running a boardinghouse on Halsted Street, where she provided cheap lodging for workers and free lodging for the homeless. She remained politically active for the rest of her life. She died in 1936 at age seventy-five.

The Parsons Family

LULU EDA PARSONS
died from a disease of the lymph glands at age eight, two years after her father’s execution.

ALBERT PARSONS, JR
. became a churchgoer, and also dabbled in Spiritualism. At age eighteen, over his mother’s strong objection, he enlisted in the Spanish-American War. In 1899 he was committed to the Illinois Northern Hospital for the Insane, where he spent the rest of his life, dying of tuberculosis in 1919 at age thirty-nine—the same age as his father when executed.

LUCY PARSONS
remained ardently political for the remainder of her long life. Bereft of husband and children, for years under constant surveillance and threat of arrest, she devoted herself to editing Albert’s unpublished
work, writing for a variety of radical periodicals, and lecturing widely on public issues. In 1894 she addressed Coxey’s Army, the march of the unemployed on Washington. In 1905 she took part in the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies). In the 1930s she spoke out in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys. And for decades, she continued her efforts to organize the workers at the McCormick reaper plant. After the Russian Revolution, she became increasingly interested in Communism, but never joined the Party. Blind in her later years, Lucy continued her activities on all fronts, and on November 11, 1937, she addressed the fiftieth anniversary commemorating the execution of the Haymarket defendants. For the last thirty years of her life, she lived with George Markstall, and they died together in a fire that consumed their small wooden house in March 1942. She is buried next to the Haymarket monument.

This novelized account of Haymarket and its participants adheres closely to the known historical record. That record, however, is skimpy. There is abundant public material—recorded speeches, newspaper articles, trial transcripts, and the like. But very little has survived that documents the private lives of those involved, and almost nothing in the way of diaries or intimate letters—those subjective road maps that reveal the most about personal experience, temperament, inner states of being, and relationships. Most of this I’ve had to invent, including Albert Parsons’s journal, the exchange of letters between him and Lucy, and nearly all of the novel’s dialogue, ruminations, and interactions. In doing so, I’ve tried to stay true to the outlines of character hinted at in the surviving shards of documentary evidence. Ollie Canby is the only fictitious person in the book. The real names of everyone else have been used throughout.

I owe an enormous debt to two people. My partner, Eli Zal, not only read every version of this novel over a four-year period, but did so with immense patience and insight. Jill Schoolman at Seven Stories Press gave me—several times over—brilliant notes on what still needed doing; and when I balked and moaned, gently waited me out. I also want to offer special thanks to Tom McCarthy who, during the book’s production phase, benevolently solved a multitude of problems.

A number of primary sources have been of great help to me. I especially wish to cite and credit the following:

Among the dozens of secondary works consulted, the following have been indispensable: